THE ARCHIVES

100 years ago

Arbroath branch of the Workers’ Union at a general meeting held last night discussed the question of the harassing delay which has taken place in regard to the payment of out-of-work benefit to a number of its members who have been thrown out of employment by the cessation of operations at Montrose Aerodrome. It appears that a number of men belonging to the Union had refused work offered to them on account of the general conditions prevailing in the locality where they were to be sent.

50 years ago

While thawing out a frozen waste pipe yesterday morning, a Dunfermline housewife accidentally set fire to her home. It was about three o’clock in the afternoon – several hours after Mrs Catherine Mitchell had used paraffin rags and paper to melt the ice in the bathroom waste pipe where it went underground – that the fire was discovered. The walls of the house are made of metal sheets with a layer of insulating material underneath but part of the bottom edge of the panel is rusted away.

25 years ago

Dundee’s three major hospitals have been given Government go-ahead to begin charging all patients, visitors and staff up to 50 pence a time to park their cars in hospital grounds. The development – which will pay for additional car parks, closed circuit TV cameras and new lighting – follows months of growing public dissatisfaction with the parking chaos and car crime epidemic at Ninewells and Dundee Royal Infirmary. The Scottish Office confirmed it had sanctioned the introduction of private parking.

One year ago

RBS plans to axe its Montrose branch should see the bank’s top boss “taken by the scruff of the neck and some sense shaken into him”, Angus’s most senior councillor has said. In a week which saw Comrie in Perthshire appear on a list of 10 branches reprieved until at least the end of the year from a 62-strong hit-list announced in December, Angus councillors have unanimously agreed to write to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in protest over the impact of the local loss. The move would leave an east coast swathe from Arbroath to Aberdeen without an RBS presence.